The driver of the train that derailed and killed 79 people in Spain was on the
phone and traveling at almost twice the speed limit when the crash happened
last week, the locomotive’s black box recorders revealed.

The train was doing 153km/h (95mph) around a bend where the speed limit was
just 80km/h (50mph) when the catastrophic derailment occurred, a preliminary
investigation showed.

It had been going 192 km/h (119mph) shortly before carriages left the rails,
but the driver activated the brakes “seconds before the crash”, according to
a written statement from a court in Santiago de Compostela.